and other contemplations…

32 posts, 32 days

Thirty-two days of consecutive posts. I’m proud of us for actually going through with our goal of writing daily. It turns out that the act of making mini contracts with yourself to commit to targets set by you, for you, is rather empowering. We had to write regardless of whether or not we were inspired by anything to write about and whether or not we had the time or energy. This exercise taught me the following things:

1) Take yourself more seriously. I was affording myself the right to be heard, which translated to increased assertion in how I express myself in my day-to-day world.

2) Take yourself less seriously. Having to take a moment a few times a week to reflect on various topics gave me enough pause to consistently remember how absurd the world can be and how much of a fool’s errand it is to take anything too personally or too seriously.

3) Giving space to unformed thoughts can help you draw more from your environment. The dusty corridors of my mind had to be visited every once in a while when I was pressed for time or really uninspired. This forced me to step back from the whirlwind of the everyday and sort through incoherent ideas. It created new frames of reference that have made me more attentive to certain phenomena in the hopes of connecting the dots.

4) Routine and discipline enhance your sense of competence. Every time I managed to post on schedule, I felt a wave of accomplishment. I would venture to say that it made me more productive in other areas as well just by increasing my self-efficacy.

5) Sometimes you produce crap. And that’s ok. Still better than constipation, err I mean writer’s block. One of the hardest things was pressing “publish” on posts I didn’t particularly like. I felt I had to post what came naturally so I never waste-binned a potential post even though some of them were truly cringe-worthy. I’ll just call it a war on perfectionism.

6) Having an accountability partner is key. As much as I hate to admit it, sometimes you have to rely on others. I know. It sucks. But having the two of us take part in this together made it both more entertaining and more feasible. It makes me think about the different types of partnership and how important it is to know yourself enough to recognize both the types of partners you need and the types of partners you can be.

7) We apparently still use “just” more than I’d like.

World Cloud based on past 32 posts

8) There’s a distinct preoccupation with “time” as well.

9) We feel a lot of different emotions but there’s certainly a tendency towards various nuances of frustration and contemplation. Sigh, humans.

Dominant feels from each of the posts

10) An audience makes a world of difference. Having people engage with the posts, give us feedback, relate to the thoughts presented, and/or ask us wtf we’re talking about has been the most interesting part of this. Thank you for reading! There’s more to come. Maybe not every day, but more often than before.